Machines are Us: Joseph Papaleo and the Literature of Sprawl

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Dennis Barone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Ethnic Heritage ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Fiction Writer

This essay examines the work of Italian American fiction writer Joseph Papaleo in the context of suburbanization, globalization, and ethnic heritage and identity. In doing so I demonstrate that Papaleo's fiction provides understanding of how Italian Americans have looked at Italy as they experienced the alienation of a consumer culture. Papaleo's fiction presents a mixed nostalgia for what Italy represents and recognition that it, too, like the United States, confronts continuous auto-dependent sprawl. Papaleo adds a suburban focus to the more frequently urban-centered literature of Italian Americans and he adds an ethic perspective to the predominantly Anglo American literature of the suburbs. His 1970 novel Out of Place depicts a materially successful Italian American, Gene Santoro, who cannot fill a deeper spiritual need in either the United States or Italy.

Italian-American Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
American Schools ◽  
Immigrant Experience

The earliest Italian American writers were immigrants who learned English and responded to their experience in America through poetry and prose, more often than not found in the early Italian language newspapers. Few had mastered the English language, and so their contributions to literature were not considered to be American. In fact, early-20th-century immigrants from Italy to the United States were hesitant to even to refer to themselves as Americans. The literature produced during this period provides great insights into the shaping of American identities and into the obstacles that these immigrants faced in pursuing their versions of the American Dream. The rise of Fascism in Italy of the 1920s–1940s would have a tremendous effect on those identities. One of the earliest Italian Americans to voice his opinion of Italian Fascism in his poetry was Arturo Giovannitti, who, with Joseph Ettor, had organized the famous 1912 Lawrence Mill Strike. National awareness of writers as Italian Americans would not begin until the likes of John Fante and Pietro di Donato published in the late 1930s. Fiction published prior to World War II primarily depicted the vexed immigrant experience of adjustment in America. The post–World War II years brought the arrival of more immigrants as serious producers of American art. Among the early writers were returning soldiers, such as Mario Puzo and Felix Stefanile, often the first of their families to be literate and attend American schools, especially with the help of the GI Bill. While many of the writers were busy capturing the disappearance of the immigrant generation, others were continuing the radical traditions. Government investigations into Communism through the House Committee on Un-American Activities sparked the ire of many Italian American artists. Increased mobility through military service and education in American schools brought Italian American writers into contact with the world outside of Little Italy and opened their imaginations and creativity to modernist experiments. Those who would gain recognition as members of the “Beat movement” responded to an apolitical complacency that seemed to set in directly after the war by fusing art and politics profoundly to affect America’s literary scene. During a time when the very definition of “American” was being challenged and changed, Italian American writers were busy exploring their own American histories. America’s postwar feminist movement had a strong effect on the daughters of the immigrants. Social action, the redefinition of American gender roles, and the shift from urban to suburban ethnicity became subjects of the writing of many young Italian Americans who watched as their families moved from working- to middle-class life. Fiction produced in the 1980s and 1990s recreated the immigrant experience from the perspective of the grandchildren, who quite often reconnected to Italy to create new identities. Contemporary Italian American literature demonstrates a growing literary tradition through a variety of styles and voices. Critical studies, beginning with Rose Basile Green’s The Italian American Novel (1974), reviews, the publication of anthologies, journals, and the creation of new presses are ample evidence that Italian American culture has gained understandings of its past as it develops a sense of a future.

Italian American Identity and Politics: World War II To the Cold War

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Danielle Battisti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines Italian American loyalty campaigns during World War II as well as postwar campaigns to promote the democratic reconstruction of Italy. It argues that even though Italian Americans had made great strides toward political and social inclusion in the United States, they were still deeply concerned with their group’s public identity at mid-century. This chapter also demonstrates that in the course of their increased involvement with their homeland politics in the postwar period, Italian Americans gradually came to believe that the successful democratization of Italy (and therefore their own standing in the United States) was dependent upon relieving population pressures that they believed threatened the political and economic reconstruction of Italy. That belief played an important role in stirring Italian Americans to action on issues of immigration reform.

scholarly journals Italian Immigrants and Working-Class Movements in the United States: A Personal Reflection on Class and Ethnicity

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolph J. Vecoli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Important Work ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Italian Immigrants ◽  
American Radicalism

Abstract The article argues that the locus of the most interesting and important work in the fields of immigration and labor history lies precisely at the intersection of class and ethnicity. In developing this thesis, particularly with respect to Italian immigrant working-class movements in the United States, the author draws on his experiences as a working-class ethnic and historian as well as his readings of the literature. In the course of his research on Italian immigrants in Chicago, the author stumbled upon the submerged, indeed suppressed, history of the Italian American left. Italian-American working-class history has since been the focus of his work. Since mainstream institutions had neglected the records of this history, the recovery of rich documentation on Italian American radicalism has been a source of particular satisfaction. These movements had also been "forgotten" by the Italian Americans themselves. Despite important work by a handful of American scholars, relatively few Italian American historians have given attention to this dimension of the Italian American experience. Curiously the topic has received more attention from scholars in Italy. Mass emigration as much as revolutionary movements was an expression of the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century Italy. As participants in those events, the immigrants brought more or less inchoate ideas of class and ethnicity to America with them. Here they developed class and ethnic identities as Italian-American workers. The construction of those identities has been a process in which the Italian immigrants have been protagonists, filtering cultural messages through the sieve of their own experiences, memories, and values. Historians of labor and immigration need to plumb the sources of class and ethnic identity more imaginatively and sensitively, recognizing that personal identity is a whole of which class and ethnicity are inseparable aspects. The author calls upon historians to salvage and restore the concepts of class and ethnicity as useful categories of analysis.

New Italian Migrations to the United States

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Critical Conversation

This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States continues the critical conversation with its predecessor by exploring Italian immigration to the United States from 1945 to the present, focusing on cultural expressivity, artistic productions, community engagement, and media representations. The book challenges our understanding of art and culture created by and about Italian Americans in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by considering ongoing Italian migratory flows. Each new group of Italian migrants and their descendants creates fresh models of Italian American culture, impacts preexisting ones, and continually reboot Italian America. The essays herein focus on such topics as transnational intimacy aided by an Italian-language radio program that broadcast messages from family members in Italy, the exoticized actors like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli who helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty, the constellation of cement figures crafted by a self-taught artist outside of Detroit, a folk-revival performer who infuses tarantella with New Age and feminist tonalities, the role of immigrant cookbook writers like Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture, and a review of current literature on the Italian “brain drain” and its impact on university Italian Studies. The afterword discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

The American Nightmare: Reading and Teaching Pietro di Donato's Ethnographic Novel Christ in Concrete

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Rose De Angelis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Course

In the interdisciplinary course entitled The Italian-American Experience, Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete is examined, explored, and analyzed within historical, socio-political, and literary contexts. The novel becomes a point of focus for the discussion of immigrant life and working-class people in a broader and contextualized understanding of Italian Americans. Students read Christ in Concrete in conjunction with essays documenting the history of workers' struggles in the United States. Read as cultural artifact, Christ in Concrete documents with historical clarity and brutal honesty the way in which the American Dream turned nightmare. Using language, religion, and social politics as focal points, the paper looks at Italian-Americans, their virtues and flaws, their struggles and triumphs, as it underscores the culture's unique contributions to the American mosaic not only in the lived lives of the novel's characters but also in the poetics of its discourse.

Fajitasand the Failure of Refrigerated Meatpacking in Mexico: Consumer Culture and Porfirian Capitalism

2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Standard Method ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Clear Plastic ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Difference

Tourists who visit a Mexican market to observe a butcher at work will readily notice the difference between the material cultures of meat in Mexico and the United States. Instead of thick, neatly cut steaks, wrapped in clear plastic, they will find butterflied strips of meat, corresponding to no known part of a cow, sawed with ragged edges but remarkable thinness, and hung on hooks and rods. Thick slabs calledsuaderomight be steak except for the checkerboards carved across the front, and seemingly random chunks ofretazocomplete the baroque display of craftsmanship. Although of little use in making Anglo-American roasts or steaks, these cuts are ideal for such delicacies ascarne asada(grilled meat) andmole de olla(chili pepper stew). Indeed, fajitas—skirt steak pounded thin and marinated, then seared quickly on a hot fire, and served with salsa and fresh tortillas— are nothing more than a Tex-Mex version of the standard method of cooking and eating beef in Mexico. Moreover, the differences between U.S. supermarket meat counters and Mexican artisanal market displays extend beyond national culinary preferences to reflect the historical growth of industrial supply chains. Indeed, meat provides a case study demonstrating the significance of consumer culture in shaping the development of Mexican capitalism during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911).

scholarly journals Italian Americans, Education, and Italian Language: 1880–1921

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Pretelli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
Italian Language ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Migrant Families ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
The Relationship

Italian migrants in the United States have been often associated to the tendency to neglect the importance of culture as an instrument of upward social mobility. Traditionally perceiving culture as a hegemonic tool of the elites, Italian migrants in the United States, who had a predominantly peasant background, were supposedly uninterested in educating their children, rather preferring that they drop out school to add with their work a supplemental income necessary to face the daily necessities of migrant families. Based on a long-standing prejudice, this supposed Italian-American disinterest towards culture and education has been revisited by some scholars, who have revaluated the migrant attitude towards the cultural realm. In the first part, this essay will offer an overview of the different scholarly views on the relationship between Italian-Americans, culture and education. In the second part, it will discuss how Italian-Americans approached the usage of the Italian language, the native idiom that was disappearing in the Little Italies with the progression of newer generations, which inevitably favoured the recourse to English. Finally, the essay will take into account how Italian governments in the Liberal Age (1861–1921) connected to the communities of the Italians in the United States through programs addressed to fostering the Italian language overseas as a way to preserve the Italianità, namely the Italian character of migrants.

“How Do We Write about This?” The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 717-731 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE MORLEY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
The Impact

This article argues that far from marking a break in recent literary development, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made less of an impact on American fiction than we often think. Critics have often accused writers after 9/11 of “retreating” into the domestic; in fact, domestic and individual narratives, often set against sweeping historical backgrounds, already dominated American writing in the late 1990s. At first, therefore, novelists handling the events of 9/11 framed them within the personal and the small-scale. In the last two years, however, writers such as Adam Haslett and Jonathan Franzen have begun publishing broader, more ambitious state-of-the-nation novels, explicitly addressing the United States' relationship with the Middle East and the impact of globalization. Yet in these novels, too, the global and the personal are tightly intertwined; again and again, writers are drawn to the domestic themes that have so often dominated American literature.

The Literatures of America—A Comparative Discipline

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lauter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Normative Model ◽  
Writers Of Color ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
And Behavior

An image has long haunted the study of American culture. It limits our thought, shapes our values. We speak of the “mainstream,” and we imply by that term the existence of other work, minor rills and branches. In prose, the writing of men like Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow—to name some of the central figures—constituted the “mainstream.” Others—writers of color, most women writers, “regional” or “ethnic” male and female authors—might, we said, be assimilated into the mainstream, though probably they would continue to constitute tributaries, interesting and often sparkling, but finally of less importance. They would, we tacitly assumed, be judged by the standards and aesthetic categories we had developed for the canonical writers. At best, we acknowledged that including in the canon writers like Wharton, Cather, Chopin, and Ellison might change somewhat our definition of the mainstream, but the intellectual model imposed by that mainstream image, this Great River theory of American letters, has persisted even among mildly revisionist critics. Such critics have continued to focus on a severely limited canon of “major” writers based on historical and aesthetic categories from this slightly augmented mainstream. The problem we face is that the model itself is fundamentally misleading. The United States is a heterogeneous society whose cultures, while they overlap in significant respects, also differ in critical ways. A normative model presents those variations from the mainstream as abnormal, deviant, lesser, perhaps ultimately unimportant. That kind of standard is no more helpful in the study of culture than is a model, in the study of gender differences, in which the male is considered the norm, or than are paradigms, in the study of minority or ethnic social organization and behavior based on Anglo-American society. What we need, rather, is to pose a comparativist model for the study of American literature. It is true that few branches of academe in the United States have been so self-consciously indifferent to comparative study as has been the field we call “American literature.”

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Ruberto ◽  
Joseph Sciorra
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Basic Information ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Entire Volume ◽  
The Past ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Critical Conversation

This chapter introduces the entire volume and thus continues a critical conversation started in New Italian Migrations to the United States, Volume 1: Politics and History Since 1945. This introductory essay considers a number of issues pertaining to creativity and culture, across both vernacular and commodified arenas. First, it recapitulates basic information about migratory flows from Italy to the United States since 1945: class, education, and motivation for emigrating are barometers employed to distinguish between different kinds of Italian migrants and Italian Americans during the past seventy years. The chapter develops increasing attention to the study of the specificity of Italian immigrants and expressive culture since 1945. Each new group of Italian migrants and their descendants creates fresh models of Italian American identity and culture and impact pre-existing ones. They effectively and continually reboot Italian America.

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